


Concealer

by desla_be



Series: SanSan Halloween [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Halloween, Makeup, No Smut, One Shot, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:55:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26964805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desla_be/pseuds/desla_be
Summary: Sandor, insecure sixteen-year-old boy that he is, is Sick and Tired of his fellow classmates making monster jokes about him. He wants to look as “normal” and un-monstrous as possible for this year’s Halloween party. Sansa, sixteen-year-old cinnamon roll that she is, informs him that makeup is a thing, and that he may be able to cover up his scars for the night after all.Given the ages, this is smut-free— but has very light sexual undertones because, hormones, because Sandor thinks Sansa’s hot and Sansa thinks Sandor’s hot and they both have hormones. But it’s mostly just wholesome and fall vibes.Sandor = what is::: makeupSansa = come to my house and find out
Relationships: Sandor Clegane & Sansa Stark, Sandor Clegane/Sansa Stark
Series: SanSan Halloween [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1967746
Comments: 26
Kudos: 91





	Concealer

Halloween, and therefore the Halloween party at school, were coming up really soon and Sandor was sick and tired of hearing his classmates make jokes about him ‘going as himself’ because he ‘already looked like a monster’. And when it wasn’t them, it was people he didn’t know complimenting him on his special effects makeup skills, and asking him where he got his burn prosthetics. 

He just wanted the scars to go away for  _ one _ day. Just for  _ one _ day, and maybe in a few years he’d help himself to some reconstructive surgery if he could afford it. For now, however, he just wanted to cover them up in time for the Halloween party. His classmates would dress up like vampires and zombies and put fake blood on their bodies, and he would look like a normal sixteen-year-old boy.

Sansa, who had not contributed to the jokes and who he had a huge crush on, played with the buttons on her coat idly.

“Can you cover them up, or can’t you?” Sandor asked her, digging his jagged fingernails sharply into his palms in the privacy of his pockets so that she couldn’t see how uncomfortable he was. His heart pounded as he awaited her answer. She’d gone on about how makeup might do the trick earlier, but then when he’d tried to talk to her about it she’d gotten clammy and silent.

“I can try,” she stammered. “I don’t know if it’ll work,” she said, and his heart turned to ice, “but I can try if you want me to.”

Sandor held his breath. She was really looking at the burned side of his face now and it was making him shifty. He didn’t want the conversation to end because it would mean that he had to go home, but he also couldn’t stand her looking at him like that. 

“Okay,” said Sansa, nodding back. “You can come over my house later today. I’ll call you.”

He was going to turn away from her finally and go home but she said  _ wait! _ and grabbed his arm. Sandor almost fell over.

“Can I see your hand?” she asked. 

He gave it to her trepidatiously, and she turned it upwards and pulled his sweatshirt cuff up his arm.

“What are you doing?” he said as she looked at his skin. Her fingers touched the inside of his palm and he felt the hairs on the back of his neck point out. 

“Just seeing how different our skin tones are,” Sansa said flatly, as though the contact meant nothing to her.

He tried to observe what she was observing. Her skin was a little rosier than his, and he supposed he was a little paler than her, but he didn’t think that such subtle differences could be very important. The sensation from her fingers was making him unsteady, and he shifted to the other foot to keep from wobbling over.

Sansa looked up to his face for a moment, studying his features in a way that made his insides twist. It was a great relief when she took her eyes off his face and set them back on his newly sweaty fingers. He wondered agitatedly why she should have the authority to make his body behave in such a way, and was even more agitated by the assumption that he possessed no equivalent authority.

“I don’t think my makeup will match you, we don’t have the same undertones,” she explained.

Sandor didn’t know what she was talking about. He nodded at her as if this difference in ‘undertones’ was obvious to him as well after their wrist hue comparisons. His hand rested in hers idly, and he wasn’t sure of whether or not she still wanted it there, or... if he should take it back, or...

“We can go to the pharmacy later and color match, if that’s okay with you?” She let go of his hand and the break in physical contact allowed his heart to start back up again, sort of, if he ignored the fact that her letting go of him had made his stomach plummet.

“Ok,” Sandor nodded, shoving his hand back into his pocket and rubbing the sweat off onto the porous fabric. “I don’t have any plans today so I can meet you there whenever you want me to.”

Sansa looked at her phone for the time. “How about in an hour? I have to do a few things but I can meet you there in an hour, and then we can walk back to my house.”

He agreed, and they separated, and as they walked respectively down opposite ends of the road Sandor felt in his chest and in his feet that he was going the wrong way, even though he could see the little green sign indicating his proper turn two hundred feet ahead.

They met an hour later outside the pharmacy at the corner in the center of town, and Sandor’s stomach was still full of butterflies. Red and yellow and orange and brown leaves littered the sidewalk, and Sandor watched as the wind made them rustle into the street. He walked there from his ugly old house, and his feet were aching a little because of the distance. He’d chosen his longest, baggiest, coziest sweatshirt, and shoved twenty dollars in crumpled bills into the pockets.

It was hardly under sixty degrees outside, but Sansa saw fit to wear a long brown peacoat that made her red hair stick out brightly. She had a little pile of leaves in her hands, and was turning them to observe each side when he crossed the street and walked up to her.

“Hi,” Sansa said warmly, and Sandor couldn’t distinguish whether she was happy to see him or just happy because she was always happy because everything was good all the time in her world.

He watched her look at her leaves for a few moments and when he became too tempted to stare at her long pretty hair, he tried to look at the gray pavement instead. He cleared his throat, “One of each?” Each leaf in her hand was a different color.

Sansa nodded. “Look how pretty they are,” she traced a perfect pale vein with one of her perfect fingernails.

Sandor swallowed and looked away again. They were pretty, he agreed. They would not beat her in a beauty pageant. He took a step back, realizing that he was so close he’d come to hovering over her and her handheld leaf pile, and he had enough sense to come to the conclusion that leaning over girls like that was likely to make them uncomfortable.

She really didn’t look uncomfortable though. She looked like she had wanted him to see her leaf pile and hear him say how pretty the leaves were, and that he had refused to look at the leaves for more than a second (because seeing her in the same field of vision was making his head spin) had obviously displeased her.

Sandor was about to bite the bullet and tell her how nice her very diverse leaf pile looked, only he didn’t have the chance to because she frowned and let them fall back on the ground.

“Wanna go in?” Sansa asked.

He nodded, and spun around to pull the heavy glass door open for her, only as an afterthought of ‘gentlemanly tendencies’ which were so completely unnatural to him.

She led the way to the cosmetics aisle, which Sandor could’ve spotted easily enough by the big posters of pretty faces and bright, shiny products, but once they were in the aisle he was utterly directionless and could only follow her idly.

They stopped in front of an enormous display of small nude-colored jars. The products didn’t look like anything more than glorified face paint, yet the price tags indicated that something very magical must’ve been going on inside.

There was a laminated card that Sansa picked up from one of the shelves and she looked at it for a moment before spinning around to face him. She extended her hand, “Can I see your wrist again?”

Sandor turned his forearm over and she held the back of his hand very gently as she placed the laminated card beside his wrist. The card must’ve had two dozen shades on it, and another two dozen on the opposite side.

Sandor’s feet rooted to the ground. He faced away from the opening of the store, which meant that he couldn’t really see anyone unless they came down the other end of the aisle, but then again, he didn’t really want to see anyone anyway. The people who did come down the aisle, he tried not to make eye contact with because he was starting to feel very very out of place in every sort of way. A teenage boy, with horrible facial scarring, in the makeup aisle, with a girl who was most certainly not his sister comparing face paint shades against his skin. He wished he didn’t care what a bunch of strangers thought, but that idle desperation didn’t stop his stomach from turning as several ladies and the occasional man walked by him while Sansa touched his forearm with the long plastic card.

“They won’t let us do swatch tests here, but I think this one might be your color,” said Sansa, pointing to one of the fairer tones.

“Okay,” he nodded, waiting for her to take the card away so that they could check out and leave.

She pulled the card away from his arm, but when she didn’t move, it became clear that there was something else. 

Sansa looked up at him with big eyes. She was tall, but he was easily half a foot taller. “Do you mind if I match it to your jaw as well, just to double check?”

“Sure,” he agreed, wishing they could just leave already.

He knew that his hair, placed strategically to cover as much of his face as possible, was going to be in her way, yet he allowed her to fumble awkwardly anyway as she tried to navigate around it, unsure of whether he wanted her to give up and leave his face alone or to take her time and linger on his skin a while longer.

Eventually she stopped trying to navigate around it, and scooped her fingers underneath a charcoal lock. “Can I move your hair?” she asked gently.

Sandor wanted to say  _ no _ , that he put it there for a  _ reason _ , but looking at her beneath his eyelashes, he just couldn’t. He nodded reluctantly, and she brought her fingers up to his temple, slipping them under his hair and tracing her way behind his ear. Sandor shivered at the contact, and when the edge of the card touched his jaw his eyelids went heavy.

“It’s good,” Sansa claimed, and did some sort of test to match a ‘concealer’ to him, which he was almost entirely unable to process considering that he was about to fall asleep standing. She pulled another fair toned squeezey-thing off the shelf without even looking at the price.

Sansa picked out a thick yellow stick, and a second green stick by the same company.

That caught Sandor’s attention. He fumbled around in his pocket, groping for his money. He glanced back at the price tags on the shelves and his heart stopped.

“I don’t have enough for all of that,” he mumbled, swallowing as he ran his fingers over the bills in his pocket.

Sansa dug into her own pockets. “It’s okay,” she said, presenting to him a wrinkle-free fifty. “I brought money, too.”

Sandor shook his head at her. “That’s too much. And I don’t want you paying for me, anyway.”

“It’s not a big deal, I really don’t have any problem paying.”

“I don’t want you to,” he told her flatly.

She opened her mouth to speak, and then stopped. “How much do you have?”

“Twenty.” It was a crappy feeling to say it out loud. He wondered numbly how much she had in  _ her _ pocket.  _ She _ probably got an allowance worth more than half a cigarette. 

Sansa looked to the products in her hands, turning them individually to look at the prices. “We need forty. I have enough.”

Sandor pointed to the light squeeze tube that she had picked up before the yellow and green sticks. “What is that? Can we put it back? Do we need it?”

“Yes, we need it,” she smiled. “And you need  _ this _ , and I don’t mind giving you twenty dollars so you can have it.”

"Okay," he relented, once again  _ miserably _ unable to deliver resistance with a shred of conviction. "But I'll pay you back."

Sansa smiled softly and scooped her arm under his before he could squirm away, and they walked up to the register. She put all of the containers of makeup on the counter and passed her fifty to the cashier. Sandor took the crumpled bills from his pocket that added up to twenty dollars and shoved them into her hand, alarmed when their fingers brushed.

The cashier gave them a white plastic bag full of their merchandise and they walked out of the store.

“I’ll give you the other twenty tomorrow,” Sandor told her as they walked along the sidewalk. The wind blew through the trees and made the front of his sweatshirt hug his chest tightly.

Their town was small enough to memorize who drove which trucks just by the sounds they made when they went by, but it wasn’t small enough, however, for there not to be nice neighborhoods and bad ones. Sansa lived in what was considered to be the best part of town. He knew exactly where her house was, and he knew what it looked like on the inside, too, because he’d been invited to her birthday party when they were in third grade. He’d met her siblings and seen her wolffish dogs and her big white picket fence, and he’d even seen, when bursting into her room during a hectic game of hide’n’seek, that she had an Ariel comforter on her bed.

Sandor knew that she must’ve known exactly where he lived, too. He’d talked his dad into having something of a birthday party for him, which he’d never had before, the following year when they were both in fourth grade, and she’d been one of the only people to come.

Sandor very carefully avoided contact with his scars as he pulled his hair a little closer to the center of his face. His hood was drawn up, though he was quite sure anyone with two eyeballs screwed in correctly could still tell that it was him, and he was also quite sure that by the beginning of next week, there would be half a dozen rumors about whether or not him and Sansa were a  _ ‘thing’ _ . He didn’t mind if people thought that, but he assumed that she did, and so he tried to cover himself up as much as possible so that he might be a little harder to identify for her sake.

They turned down a tree-lined corner and he knew by heart that her house was halfway down the end of the street. Before the house came into view he could picture the beige siding, the pretty hedges, the white picket fence. The acrylic on the siding was discolored in the corners, the hedges were never perfectly trimmed, and the paint on the fence was chipped in several places, yet every time he walked by it, it was still so perfect and dreamy— enough to make his heart flutter. 

Wet leaves clung to Sandor’s feet as they walked closer and closer. As Sansa moved, the plastic bag in her hand swung through the air noisily. He was grappling for something he could say to her but before he had the chance to speak, she pushed the stark white gate open and they walked up the cobblestone path to her front door.

She pushed the pretty brown door open and he walked in after her. The house immediately smelled like vanilla.

“Sansa?” someone who Sandor supposed to be her dad called out to them.

“Dad,” Sansa said back. “My friend Sandor’s here.”

Sansa’s dad emerged from another room. He was still in his work clothes, and he wasn’t much taller than Sandor. 

“Hi, Sandor,” he smiled and waved, then turned to Sansa again. “Keep your door open, please.”

“Yeah,” Sansa nodded quickly, her cheeks going red, “of course.” She seemed eager to get away from her dad as she directed Sandor to their big mahogany staircase.

Sandor’s feet clamored against the steps as they walked up to the second floor. He thought he might’ve lasted a little longer before feeling uncomfortable in her home, but not after that comment about keeping the door open. Of course her dad wanted her to keep the door open if he was there, because he didn’t want anything bad to happen to her. Gregor had had plenty of girls over, and Sandor’s dad never asked him to keep the door open, but Sandor lived in the room right next to Gregor’s. He heard what happened when Gregor had girls over, and even better when they had the door shut in his room, and he thought that his dad should’ve asked more often. 

She pushed her bedroom door open and he followed her in. The windows perched in her periwinkle walls were open, the curtains were drawn apart, and he could see beautiful piles of leaves sitting high on the green grass. It was chilly, and he wondered how long the windows had been open as she set the clear plastic bag on her desk and began to unbutton her coat.

Things were a bit different from the last time he was there. Her bedspread wasn’t Ariel anymore, but instead a comforter covered in little roses, and all the furniture was bigger as well. The posters on her walls were different, he thought, but it still felt like the same wondrous fairytale-land it had been five year ago. Fake flowers hung from the ceiling, and the wooden panel flooring was almost entirely hidden by an eclectic collection of fluffy rugs. The pale walls were cluttered with her artwork and pictures of her and her siblings and friends. 

Sansa crossed the room and gathered a transparent purple bag from her dresser. She dropped the bag, along with the plastic bag full of the materials they’d just bought, onto a big fluffy blue rug at the foot of her bed.

“Do you want a snack?” She turned to him and pointed to the door, “My mom made cookies yesterday. Chocolate chip. Are you thirsty? We have—“

_ Cookies _ , he thought. That explained the vanilla. “I’m not thirsty,” Sandor said. “I’ll have a cookie.”

“Okay,” Sansa smiled, and pointed to the fuzzy rug. “You can sit, I’ll be right back.”

Sandor sat down on the rug. It felt as fluffy and comfortable as it looked, he thought, leaning his back against the foot of her bed and shoving his hands into his pockets. He could see brushes big and small poking out of the transparent purple bag and wondered what else was in there that they’d need. Butterflies were still dancing in his stomach but he was eager for her to come back into the room, and just as eager for the cookies she said she’d bring. He let his head lean back against the edge of her bed and stared up at the wall.

After two minutes or twenty, the door pushed open and Sansa emerged through the frame. She had an orange plate of cookies in one hand and struggled to hold two mismatched mugs in the other.

Sansa placed a lavender mug next to him. “I brought you some homemade apple cider. We went apple picking last week and my dad has a juicer. It’s pretty good.” 

Before she could even set the cookies down on the rug Sandor snatched one from the plate.

Sansa laughed in surprise and set her mug down. “Are you... hungry? I can get you something else, if you are...”

He shook his head and took a sip from the lavender mug. “Thanks for the cider.” Sandor could taste the cinnamon, and struggled to grasp that her parents had  _ made  _ this for them. Just for them, he thought, just for the sake of making apple cider for their kids. 

“You’re welcome,” she sat down across from him with the plate of cookies between them, “and if you change your mind, I can always get you something else.”

She played music from some fancy speaker and sang along to mainstream pop between chocolate-chip-cookie bites and sips of apple cider. Bringing up a plate full of cookies was a mistake on her part; Sandor had shoveled four into his mouth by the time she finished her first one. He hoped these weren’t the last of the cookies because Sansa had implied that her mom made them from scratch. They also  _ tasted _ like they were made from scratch— and he once again couldn’t understand why a parent would do such a thing when they sold these at the gas station in bulk for three-ninety-nine. 

Sansa pulled the contents from their white plastic bag and laid them out on the fuzzy rug. The hair on the back of Sandor’s neck rose as the glass containers clinked together. She grabbed a few brushes and a triangular sponge from the purple bag and set them down, keeping the sponge in her hand and twisting it idly.

“We can start whenever you’re ready,” Sansa said.

Sandor nodded, wiping cookie crumbs and apple cider residue off of his mouth with the cuff of his sweatshirt. “What should I do?”

She pulled a hair elastic off her wrist and held it out to him.

Sandor glared at her. He  _ hated _ putting his hair up, and to have it up here so that she could see how the burns on his scalp had made his hairline patchy and uneven wasn’t an appealing idea.

Sansa widened her eyes at him and her hand twitched awkwardly mid-air. “It’s just that… if you put your hair up, it’ll be easier,” she said gently.

He shook his head, and she pulled her hair tie back onto her wrist.

“All right,” Sansa made herself smile. She was obviously wounded, and he hadn’t wanted that, although the exposure would’ve made him miserable and humiliated and he didn’t want that either. “Is it okay if I move it a little...?”

Sandor nodded. It was okay as long as ‘a little’ meant  _ a little _ .

She leaned forward on her knees and brought her hand up to the side of face. Sandor didn’t breathe. He couldn’t feel her fingers touching his skin very well, but he could feel her moving his hair back, until she came upon what should’ve been an ear but wasn’t, and then she stopped.

“Can I pin it...?” she pointed off to her dresser.

He nodded reluctantly. He didn’t want her to move his hair out of his face at all, but he was pretty sure that was non-negotiable if he wanted her to cover his burns effectively, and therefore he didn’t have much of a choice.

Sansa retrieved a green pin from a box on her dresser ( _ of course _ her pins were rainbow edition) and snugged it up against Sandor’s scalp. It held his hair back a little too tightly, but what was really uncomfortable was the cold air that touched his burns to remind him of the exposure he had, moments ago, been trying to protect.

She sat back on her haunches and began shuffling through the two bags, and Sandor huffed with relief that she wasn’t so close to his face anymore. Of course, ten seconds later she pulled out a jar from her purple bag and got her little blue sponge ready and she was in his face again.

Sansa uncapped the little container and scraped some of the contents onto the back of her hand. She was still singing along to her awful pop music when she dipped the sponge into a white, lotion-like substance and raised it to Sandor’s face.

He put his hand out. “What’s that?”

“Primer,” she said, and reached over to show him the bottle. “It protects your skin, and makes makeup last longer.”

Sandor put his hand back into his pocket and let her get back to what she was doing. She pressed the sponge to his warped skin and patted it around over his cheek, and his jaw, and around his eye, and over his forehead. The sensation on his scars was weird— because his nerves were too damaged to be able to feel exactly what was happening, but they weren’t damaged enough to stop him from feeling everything entirely. And also there was the fact that someone from whom he wanted attention was paying  _ a lot _ of attention to his face and that he hadn’t gotten this much attention since his face had been treated in the first place.

Her arms were completely bare except for four little straps and a few friendship bracelets, and because Sandor felt uncomfortable with her face so close, he settled to count her freckles idly. She was close enough to him, however, that he couldn’t help but notice that she smelled really nice, and that made him wonder if he smelled nice or not. Probably not, he thought.

Sansa reached for the green stick, uncapped it and leaned forward. It revealed as a sort of brush pen.

“Do you mind if I put my hand here?” she asked, touching his shoulder.

“No.” Sandor cleared his throat, “What’s that?” Honestly he didn’t care what it was specifically, because he wasn’t going to remember in five minutes. The truth was that his pants were getting a bit tight and he needed  _ anything _ to think about other than her hand on his shoulder or her chest in front of his face, or he was going to have a  _ problem _ . 

“It’s color corrector,” Sansa said. “It’s green because your...  _ scars _ ,” her voice got a bit quiet for that part— as though it was a bad word, “... are red. Red and green are complementary, so the green is supposed to cancel out the red. And the yellow one balances the green so that it doesn’t show too much under the foundation.”

“Oh.” Again, he wasn’t listening, he just needed to be distracted. Of course, her voice was so angelic that it sort of, well, it was having the opposite effect. Sandor looked at the messy array of containers next to her legs to try to mask the fact that he still didn’t really get it. And to stop looking at her front. 

She pressed her hand to his shoulder and painted his face with the green brush-stick and he overheated under his polyester sweatshirt. Her hands were so pretty, and her hair was frizzy around the edges, and a song came on that Sandor didn’t think was terrible... and he thought very defensively that he was happy. He was enjoying this, and it wasn’t going to last forever, and there was nothing he could do about that.

“So, do you know what you’re going to wear for the Halloween party?” Sansa asked, brushing away.

“Nothing special. Do you?” She pressed her hand deeper into his shoulder and he let out a breath. 

“I’m planning to go as an angel,” Sansa said, switching to the yellow brush pen and beginning to paint more layers on his skin.

_ Of course you are _ , Sandor thought, and resisted the urge to roll his eyes because she was so close and she’d see him. “An angel, yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m sure you won’t be alone. There were a lot of people who didn’t dress up as anything last year and there’ll probably be just as many this year.”

“Probably,” said Sandor, trying to push out ideas regarding what her angel costume looked like, and more specifically, what it looked like on her.

She put the yellow stick down and reached for the little squeeze bottle of pale face paint. After squeezing some onto the back of her hand, she grabbed a fluffy brush and got to layering. He wished he could’ve felt what was happening in full, but if he could, they probably wouldn’t be here. Where he could feel it, it felt very good. So good, he nearly fell  _ asleep _ ! The most sensitive spots were the edges of the burns, where the scarring was thinnest and where he’d suffered the least nerve damage— that’s where it felt the best. The soft, cool brush danced gently on his skin and he fought to keep his eyes open.

“But if for some reason everyone shows up in costume this year, I’ll bring a change of clothes for myself so that you won’t feel alone.”

Sandor’s heart clenched— he hadn’t been expecting to hear anything like that. “You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I know,” she said cheerily, “but I wouldn’t want you to feel alone. It’ll just be in case. Like I said, I think there’ll be a lot of people who show up in normal clothes.”

“Right,” he stammered.

Sansa put her brush down. She reached for the bottle of ‘foundation’ of his color, unscrewed the cap, and poured a little onto the back of her hand. She dabbed some away with the sponge and touched it to his face.

“Will you be able to do this again on the night of the party?” Sandor asked, looking up through his eyelashes to where she leaned over him.

“Of course. If you bring your stuff over we can both get ready here.”

“I’ll walk with you if you want me to,” he said, digging his fingernails sharply into his thighs underneath the privacy of his pockets. “To the party, I mean.”

Sansa held the murky sponge in the air in front of his face and smiled. “Are you asking me to go with you? To be your date?”

Sandor’s stomach turned at the mention of ‘date’. He bit his tongue. “I’m just saying that it’ll be dark, and I could walk with you seeing as I’ll already be here. If you wanted me to.”

“There’s no reason why we wouldn’t walk together as long as you’ll already be here,” she pressed the blue sponge to his cheek and laughed. “But suppose you  _ were _ to ask me to be your date... I’d say yes.”

His heart stopped— he hadn’t been expecting to hear that either!— and he thought really really hard about whether or not this was actually happening. 

“The colors are blending really nicely,” Sansa added as though he had the capacity to think about anything other than what she’d just said to him.

“Are you saying that you want to be my date?” Sandor asked, wiping the newly compiled sweat off his clammy hands.

She put the sponge down and grabbed a jar of powder and a big fluffy brush. The powder went away in clouds when she tapped the brush into it, but this didn’t seem to faze her, and the steadiness of her hand when she touched his face with the brush implied a calmness that Sandor envied.

“I’m saying that  _ I _ don’t have a date, and if  _ you _ had a date, I would assume that they’d be doing your makeup for you instead of me. Therefore, since neither of us have dates, and you’ll be coming here on the day of the party, and we’ll be going to the party together, it wouldn’t be such a radical idea in my eyes for us to go together as dates, were you to ask me.”

Little particles of powder swam in front of his eyes and made her face foggy for a moment, which he didn’t consider a preferable time for her face to be foggy. He could hardly muster up the coordination to move a muscle during this seemingly unbelievable moment, meanwhile she was perfectly fine and sustained the abilities to both do his makeup and sing along to the music coming from the stereo.

“So,” Sandor breathed, “we’re going together. As dates.”

“Not yet,” Sansa said, gesturing for him to close his eyes and then sweeping the brush over the one on the side of his face she was working with. “You haven’t asked me to go with you.”

When she stopped her sweeping, he opened his eyes again to see her screwing the cap onto the little jar of powder.

Sandor sighed. “But you just said—“

“I said  _ were you to ask me _ .”

He was not pleased by the fact that, despite her clearly implying that she wouldn’t object to being his date to the Halloween party, he was still worried that she’d say no if he asked her. He’d never asked anyone to go anywhere with him like this, and the notion of saying the words out loud was making his stomach turn.

She reached into the purple bag and he watched as she pulled out a dark bottle. Liquid sploshed as she moved the bottle in her hands. “Close your eyes,” she said, and he did. He felt a mist on his lips, and his nose, and part of his forehead, but nothing on the side of his face where she’d layered makeup over leathery skin.

Sansa smiled at him, set the bottle down, and sat back on her haunches. “You look really nice,” she said as she touched his shoulder, and he thought that she was telling the truth.

“Will you be my date to the Halloween party?” Sandor mumbled, half annoyed by her insistence that he be vulnerable and say it out loud, half desperate of an unwavering, joyous yes that came sooner rather than later.

“I’d love to be your date to the Halloween party,” she smiled. “Do you want to see how you look?”

He nodded, and they got up and went over to her standing mirror, and he stood half a foot taller than her and looked at himself before he could even overthink it.

“It’s not a perfect color match,” Sansa said humbly, “and you can still see the texture if you look really closely, but all the redness is gone.”

Sandor ran his finger gently over his least favorite cheek. He was worried that the makeup would come off, but he wanted to touch it anyway just to guarantee that it was real and that it wouldn’t disintegrate under his hand. “It’s great,” he said. “It’s really really good.” He couldn’t see the redness, he couldn’t see the waxy texture... he couldn’t even really tell that it wasn’t a perfect color match. His face looked a little weird on that side, but it didn’t matter because the scars were gone. He couldn’t see them anymore, and if he wasn’t very very very careful and contained, he would be at risk of bursting into tears. 

“It should be pretty lasting. I’ll give you something to take it off with.”

She gave him a small ziplock bag with a handful of wipes and he shoved it into his sweatshirt pocket, and they walked downstairs to hear the tv in the living room playing. Sansa’s dad was sitting on the couch with a phone pressed to his ear and the face of a wolffish dog whose body stretched over the other two cushions rested in his lap. 

“I should probably go home,” Sandor told her reluctantly. He had  _ no _ desire to leave, and even less desire to go back to his house, but he hadn’t told anyone that he was here and didn’t feel like testing his dad’s temper tonight. 

“Okay,” Sansa said, almost… sadly, he thought, and she rushed over to what he realized was a platter of chocolate chip cookies. She was placing them into a container for him when he tried to stop her. 

“I couldn’t,” Sandor said. “Your mom made them, and I already ate four.” 

She chuckled. “You liked them. My parents will be happy that you took some.” 

“Only a few then.” In her defense, there were a lot more cookies than he’d anticipated, and it wouldn’t really hurt if he took a few home, he didn’t think. 

She pinched the lid on the Tupperware container until it snapped into place. He wondered how long ago the cookies had been baked to leave the whole house still smelling like vanilla. 

“I’ll walk you out,” Sansa said after handing him the little plastic container. 

They walked by her dad in the living room, who waved goodbye to Sandor between the phone call he was having, and Sansa pushed her big front door open and they walked out. 

Sandor was turning to tell her thank you, but before he could even plant his feet on the steps properly she grabbed the arms of his sweatshirt. “Do you mind if I hug you?” Sansa asked quietly.

“No,” Sandor shook his head, reorienting to keep himself from falling over. “Not at all.”

She took a breath, and dug her arms under his and pulled him really close. It was a little awkward to still be holding a plastic container of cookies in one hand, but he gave her his best hug. 

However, for her to smell so good in this proximity was overwhelming, and as was the contact in general. He was unable to suppress a long sigh, though to his surprise, she reciprocated it. 

And then she let go, and brushed her hair back, and Sandor was left intoxicated with this afternoon’s affection, sleepy-eyed and wobbly and astounded that they’d be going to the Halloween party together. As dates. 

“All right,” Sansa said. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” he waved, and again, before he could fully take his next step, she cupped his shoulder and spun him back around, but he managed, impressively— once again— to keep himself from falling over. 

Sansa held him gently by the shoulder, and he held the container of cookies and stared at her, waiting for her to do whatever it was she was so intent on doing. 

She lifted her other hand and placed it on his neck, and Sandor watched as her eyelashes fluttered. He wondered if he should put the cookies down or not, and he wondered if her dad could see what was going on through the living room window, and he really  _ really _ wondered what exactly she was going to do that required her to lean in so close.

Sandor stopped breathing around the time she put her lips on his cheek, the cheek whose nerves worked very very well, and she kissed him very gently, and pulled back. She took her hand back from his neck and let go of his shoulder, smiling as she did so, and that time, there was no catching his balance.  _ That _ time Sandor fell over. 

**Author's Note:**

> I have like 6 more prompts for this Sansan Halloween series and at the rate that I’ve been writing, if I’m still posting Halloween fics in February, I’m sorry... and also I’m not, because:::: Halloween.
> 
> Also i made a playlist for this fic because i literally can’t write a fic without a corresponding playlist so this is that playlist::: https://open.spotify.com/user/beth_d11/playlist/2gBBHpNu8DiLBfbc1F2rqG?si=3TdXkvEQRgmgo2DqHaY3xQ 
> 
> it was pretty similar to my childhood experience until blink 182, which i added for the sake of every single blink 182 song having the energy of a fourteen-year-old virgin boy, and— lol, sandor has that energy in all of my modern fics. other than that, v wholesome playlist of songs i mostly no longer listen to because i’m an aLtERnaTIVe jUNkiE.
> 
> & if you like fic playlists, feel free to also browse my others which include: put a muzzle on it (sandor): fairytaleland (sansa): we fell in love circa 283 (ned and cat vibes if ned and cat were born in the ‘60s, and the inspo for the yet-to-be-posted a spoonful of promises update.)
> 
> alright have a nice day folks, hope you are safe and happy, and i hope you enjoyed this <3
> 
> edit: stay tuned for chapter 2!


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